The following wiki has the purpose of partially fulfilling the assignment requirements for the module BM6009-20NP New Trends in Management.
Introduction
The following wiki will be analysing the topic of Social Media Marketing. It will give the reader insights into the background, practises and techniques for the effective use of social media in business. Additionally, it will determine if Social Media Marketing is new, a trend and/or a management practise.
Background
In today’s technology-driven society, the Internet and especially social media platforms have changed the way consumers and dealers communicate. The Internet as such, has very distinct characteristics (Peterson et al., 1997), such as:
The ability to inexpensively store vast amounts of information at different virtual locations
Interactivity and the ability to provide information on demand
The ability to serve as a transaction medium
Relatively low entry and establishment cost for sellers
The improvements in the Internet, as mentioned above, that have happened during the recent years, have made it possible for businesses to discover a new system to communicate with its customers and to sell their products and services without the need for physical interactions.
Furthermore, the availability of the Internet has given individuals the possibility to use social media to communicate amongst themselves. From the use of the classic e-mail to established social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, all of these platforms have one thing in common: data can be accessed from anywhere and at any time.
Web 2.0
Social media are a part of the ‘Web 2.0 advancement’. Web 2.0 describes Internet websites that emphasise user-generated content accessible by end users. The term Web 2.0 was introduced and popularised by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty at their O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. (Tim O’Reilly, 2005)
A Web 2.0 website has the feature to allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a virtual community, also called social media.
Social media platforms
Social media have many different platforms that people can access at any time. Social media have been gradually established over time, resulting in the core ‘top 5’ social networks which don’t change much from year-to-year. The usage of networking sites varies a lot depending on the level of usage in different countries and demographics.
Looking at social media networks worldwide, the ‘top 5’ dominating ones are Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, QQ and WeChat, as of April 2016. Other common networks include Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Skype and Snapchat, to name a few.
Social media platforms such as Facebook dominate the market because of their varied content. The platform has responded to the media platform YouTube by integrating more media such as photo filters, native videos and live streaming. (Mintel, 2016)
This procedure has blurred the boundaries between social and media networks and as a result, Facebook has seen a growth in penetration in 2016 compared to a decline in users visiting YouTube. (Mintel, 2016)
Social media marketing - A new trend in management?
Social networking sites have arrived in today’s world and are being used by retailers to extend their marketing campaigns to a wider range of consumers. Chi (2011, 46) defines social media marketing as a “connection between brands and consumers, while offering a personal channel and currency for user-centred networking and social interaction”. On the other hand, (Felix et al., 2016) generally states that it is the use of social media platforms to promote a product or service.
As of January 2016, the total population was 7,395 billion.
A third (31%) of the overall population are active users on social media, 2,307
billion people. (Smart Insights, 2016)
The effective use of social media marketing can have many important effects for businesses.
Back in 2014, Forbes (2014) listed benefits for businesses that use social media for marketing purposes: Increased brand recognition, improved brand loyalty, better search engine rankings
and richer customer experiences, to name a few.
In conclusion, Forbes magazine (2014) stated that “social media marketing, when done right, can lead to more customers, more traffic, and more conversations.”
Those statistics come from 2014 and back then, social media marketing was already an emerging new trend for businesses. Trends in management can be described as a large, measurable shift that influences values and behaviours. A trend is normally triggered when a larger force asserts itself on a culture, forcing that culture to respond and change. (Hawkpartners, 2017)
Back in 2014, social media was slowly emerging but was also considered by some people as a passing fad, something that is only temporary. (Hootsuit, 2016)
In 2014, statistics from the MarchTech (2014) showed that 8 of out 10 SMBs use social media for the business to drive growth. 3 in 5 SMBs mentioned they had gained new customers by using social media.
Nowadays, popular social media platforms have become very important for businesses as they offer valuable data about their customers and it is mostly free to reach out to them. As of 2016, social media integration for businesses is no longer optional. (Hootsuit, 2016)
A recent report from Mintel (2016) states that in the United Kingdom, as of July 2016, 81% of consumers have visited a social media network, with 75% having visited Facebook.
The social media platform remains the number one network in the world, with over 1.59 billion users on Facebook each month.
However, the report also mentions that brand interactions on social media remain limited. Despite the popularity of social media, “more than half of all social media users in the UK say that they would never buy a product using a ‘Buy’ button”, (Mintel, 2016)
Although this is the case, social media marketing remains a management practise.
IGI Global (2013) indicates that management practises usually refer to working methods and innovations that are approved by managers and are used to improve effectiveness of work systems.
Social media are mostly used as a marketing and customer service tool that aims to direct customers towards the websites or the stores. (Mintel, 2016)
It has become a trend in management over recent years and has shown that it is important for businesses to invest into the use of social media.
At the beginning of 2017, new social media marketing trends are expected to take over soon.
Sprout Social (2017) have come up with new trends that will be emerging in 2017.
New trends include more customer service (Chat-bots) that improve customer care, priority on business features and analytics, social shopping, instant purchases and many more.
Social media will always grow and new technologies will improve the online environment. Therefore, new methods and procedures of social media marketing will emerge that will develop the use of social media marketing and its effectiveness over the next years.
All in all, social media marketing has become an important management practise that started trending a few years ago. It will keep its status of being a new trend for management as new possibilities to make social media marketing even more profitable will arise.
Is Social media marketing relevant to society?
Another relevant question for businesses aiming to implement social media strategies in their marketing portfolio is to find out how social media marketing is relevant to today’s society. Statistics from Statista (2016) show the daily time spent on social networking platforms by Internet users worldwide from 2012 to 2016 in minutes.
These statistics show that in 2012 the daily time spent on social media worldwide was 96 minutes whereas nowadays in 2016 it is 118 minutes daily. This is an increase of 19% between the years 2012 and 2016.
Given that information and the statistics by Smart Insights (2016) stating that 31% of the overall population are actively using social media, it is an indication that social media is relevant to today’s society. Businesses need to react towards this trend and invest heavily into their social media marketing portfolio in order to reach out to the 2.307 billion people that are actively using social media on a daily basis. (Smart Insights, 2016)
Implementation of a social media marketing strategy
The process of all businesses that aim to use social media for marketing purposes is to carefully consider the implementation process of doing so. It is important to consider a relationship between a social media marketing strategy and the desired outcomes.
With the help of social media, businesses are able to communicate not only with existing customers but also to acquire new customers. (Chanthinok et al., 2015,39)
Chanthinok et al. (2015,40) suggest that in order to successfully implement a social media marketing strategy, a key conceptual framework, involving customers, products, and competitor response aspects, needs to be taken into consideration.
Customer communication channel focus
One of the components of a social media marketing strategy is the focus on the customer communication channels. It refers to the “ability of a firm to employ social media tools to announce, contact educate, and connect with its customers and prospects, giving them a voice and discussion on shared interest in order to enhance the relationship with consumers.” (Chanthinok et al., 2015,40)
In other words, businesses are only successfully implementing a social media marketing campaign if they carefully consider which social media channel they use. The key is to reach out to customers on platforms that are very popular and used by all possible customers.
As already mentioned above, Mintel’s (2016) report states that 75% of those 81% of the population who visit a social media platform use Facebook as their main communication/social media channel. Therefore, it can be said that Facebook as the most popular platform has the largest audience and is therefore the ideal choice for a marketing campaign.
However, each individual platform has different capabilities.
Where YouTube mainly focuses on media, Twitter on short messages, so-called ‘Tweets’ and Instagram on the sharing of photos, Facebook combines all of the above and therefore makes it the most usable social media platform.
Product Diversity Presentation Awareness
The term product diversity presentation awareness indicates the ability of a firm to match the expectations that customers have. This can be based on features of the products, packaging, design and brand image. (Frambach et al., 2003)
In order for businesses to be successful in delivering a social media marketing campaign, all the above perceived values that consumers desire must be met. On the other hand, this promotes the positive brand values that consumers will identify with a brand.
Overall, the product presentation online and therefore the perceived perception of the product plays an important role in the decision whether or not consumers buy the product/ service or not.
Proactive competitor learning capability
This important concept refers to the ability of a firm to ‘scan’ and monitor its competitive environment. According to Ma et al. (2011), this is done in order to forecast and evaluate competitive situations and to access their marketing activity and strategies relating to the social media implementation. Proactive learning can be divided into two categories, external and internal learning. The external part takes place when analysing competitor’s behaviour. It is one way to achieve competitive advantage.
The proactive competitor learning capability is very important for businesses to implement social media marketing strategies. Making use of available information from competitors can increase the effectiveness of the proposed social media marketing campaign.
Traditional Media vs. Social Media Advertising
The difference between traditional marketing strategies and social media marketing is important for businesses aiming to implement social media marketing campaigns.
First and foremost, statistics by Lyfe Marketing (2016) show that, if the company uses social media marketing, it costs less than $3 ($2.50) to reach out to over 100 people. As opposed to newspaper with $16, broadcast TV with $28 and direct mail adding up to $57. This shows how comparatively inexpensive social media marketing can be.
Additionally, social media offers to incorporate traditional elements into the campaign. Businesses can advertise video commercials, publish articles, host live streams and webinars and many more. Lyfe Marketing (2016) indicates that “Social media is the only ‘billboard’ that can communicate to your customers, answer their questions, and provide them with feedback.”
All in all, social media marketing is the cheapest way for businesses to implement marketing campaigns and it’s the only way that can combine both traditional marketing aspects and social media.
Case Study Mercedes Benz
The following example of a case study represents a very good use of social media to attract customers and to raise awareness. Back in 2013, Mercedes Benz launched a social media marketing campaign.
The social media campaign had the title ‘Take the Wheel: a photography competition on the road’ (Mercedes-Benz, 2013) Five of Instagram’s top photographers each had the challenge to drive the CLA for 5 days around a certain route in America. The route was different for all participants.
It was the overall task for each individual candidate to upload as many interesting, breath-taking and fascinating photographs on their journey with the CLA.
Whoever, reached the goal of having the most likes on all pictures combined, was able to keep the Mercedes CLA. Mercedes called the 5-day competition the ‘Battle of likes’ and inspired the participants with the opportunity for limitless creativity. (Mercedes-Benz, 2013)
Mercedes wanted to reach out to the younger audience of social media. By the end of the campaign, Mercedes received 87,000,000 Instagram impressions, 2,000,000 Instagram likes and 150 marketing assets in form of fascinating photos. (Mercedes-Benz, 2013)
Nowadays, this form of marketing is very popular among businesses of all sorts. Companies that thrive to motivate customers into buying products or services need a good marketing team to convince and sell their products to the audience.
Case Study Emirates
The foreign airline company Emirates has had a few very successful social media campaigns in 2016. The overall challenge was to convince people to fly with Emirates as opposed to their competitors. It was not enough to just offer the best plane and great service.
Emirates marketing team understood that and used the actress Jennifer Aniston to represent their brand as a brand influencer. (David, 2016)
Emirates combined their classic tours through the cabins and the experience inside an Emirates plane with the charming attendance of Jennifer, using her as a tour guide through the plane. This method has brought Emirates over 5.2 million views on their video. (Emirates, 2016)
It was Emirate’s overall aim to attract more customers into flying with Emirates by using Jennifer Aniston representing the company.
Social Cognitive Theory
In the 1960s, Albert Bandura developed the Social Cognitive Theory that has its roots in psychology. His theory was that humans learn behaviours by others performing those behaviours and imitating them. (Bandura, 1989)
In today’s society, social media platforms become the source of observational learning. (Bandura, 1989)
This model can be applied to many different variables like the attitude towards the environment or purchasing behaviour.
For instance, Emirates uses a famous actress to advertise their planes, in order to attract more customers and therefore use a cognitive behavioural approach to try to persuade people to use Emirates for their next journey.
Many companies use and pay famous or influential people on social media to advertise their products. Using famous people that have reached a certain amount of “followers” are the ideal match for marketing campaigns on social media. Those celebrities are followed by the vast majority of users on social media and are therefore very helpful when companies are trying to reach out to people or to persuade people to purchase products.
The social cognitive theory can also be applied when campaigns appear that promote awareness of the environment. Many famous individuals like Leonardo DiCaprio are trying to spread awareness for climate change. They achieve this by using social media marketing to reach out to as many people as possible, knowing that people will listen and even implement the same environmental safety steps to follow their idols. With the help of his 14 million followers on Instagram, Caprio can easily reach many people at the same time. The Guardian (2016) represents him as one of the world’s top climate change champions, having his own foundation with funding of at least $30 million dollars.
Reaching out to people in order to gain more customers from the company’s perspective or to raise awareness for global problems are two ways of using social media marketing, reaching out to over 2.3 billion active users. (Smart Insights, 2016)
Conclusion
In conclusion, social media marketing is relatively new to our society. Social media had its origins in 2002 with the establishment of Friendster, which was one of the first social media platforms in the 21st century, Facebook appearing in 2004, as a social media platform only open to Harvard students and shortly after that in 2006 the text-based social media service Twitter was introduced. (Social Times, 2011)
In 2007, Facebook introduced ‘Pages’, allowing businesses to create their own pages to advertise their products and services. This example of Facebook introducing their own way for people to use Facebook as their social media marketing platform was clever. As of January 2016, Facebook alone runs 50 million small business pages. (Facebook, 2016)
Overall, it is a trending and growing marketing strategy with more and more companies adopting towards it.
Even though social media platforms have been around for almost two decades and social media marketing is common to our society, businesses still keep adapting towards the possibilities to implement social media into their marketing strategies. Therefore, it indicates that the process of implementing social media marketing campaigns is a relatively new concept.
Additionally, based on the statistics showing an increase in the usage of social media, social media marketing will keep its status of being a new trend in management.
As Hawkpartners (2017) mentioned, trends are shaped by large forces and evolve over time.
Since social media were first established in the early years of the 21st century until now, social media marketing has been discussed and implemented by many businesses. It has evolved over time and many possibilities to use social media as a marketing tool have occurred. However, new technologies and concepts to use social media even more effectively will arrive in the future. Therefore, social media marketing won’t lose its status of being a new trend in management.
Furthermore, social media marketing is also a very important management practise as social media are widely accepted by many businesses and their management.
It is a common tool amongst businesses nowadays and even one of the cheapest ways to communicate with customers and to raise brand awareness.
With the increasing number of businesses and management adapting social media marketing and the ever-growing number of people using social media on a daily basis, social media will play a very big role in our society over the coming years, both for individuals and for businesses.
References
Chanthinok, K, Ussahawanitichakit, P, and Jhundra-indra, P (2015) 'SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY AND MARKETING OUTCOMES: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK', Allied Academies International Conference: Proceedings Of The Academy Of Marketing Studies (AMS), 20, 2, pp. 35-52, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost
Chi, Hsu-Hsien (2011) ‘Interactive Digital Advertising VS. Virtual Brand Community: Exploratory Study of User Motivation and Social Media Marketing Responses in Taiwan’, Journal of Interactive Advertising, 12, pp. 44-61.
Frambach, R.T., Prabhu, J. and Verhallen, T.M. (2003) The influence of competitive strategy on new product activity: The role of market orientation. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 20 (4), 377-397.
Ma, Z., Pant, G. and Sheng, O. R. L. (2011) Mining competitor relationships from online news: A network-based approach. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 10 (4), 418–427.
Mintel (2016) ‘Online Retailing – UK – July 2016. London: Mintel Group Ltd.
Peterson, R. A., Balasubramanian, S., and Bronnenberg, B. J. (1997) ‘Exploring the Implications of the Internet for Consumer Marketing’, Academy of Marketing Science, 25(4), pp. 329-346. doi: 10.1177/0092070397254005
Yoo, J. and Kim, M. (2012). Online product presentation: The effect of product coordination and a model’s face. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 6 (1), 59–72.
Table of Contents
BM6009-20NP New Trends in Management.
Introduction
The following wiki will be analysing the topic of Social Media Marketing. It will give the reader insights into the background, practises and techniques for the effective use of social media in business. Additionally, it will determine if Social Media Marketing is new, a trend and/or a management practise.
Background
In today’s technology-driven society, the Internet and especially social media platforms have changed the way consumers and dealers communicate. The Internet as such, has very distinct characteristics (Peterson et al., 1997), such as:
The improvements in the Internet, as mentioned above, that have happened during the recent years, have made it possible for businesses to discover a new system to communicate with its customers and to sell their products and services without the need for physical interactions.
Furthermore, the availability of the Internet has given individuals the possibility to use social media to communicate amongst themselves. From the use of the classic e-mail to established social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, all of these platforms have one thing in common: data can be accessed from anywhere and at any time.
Web 2.0
Social media are a part of the ‘Web 2.0 advancement’. Web 2.0 describes Internet websites that emphasise user-generated content accessible by end users. The term Web 2.0 was introduced and popularised by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty at their O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. (Tim O’Reilly, 2005)
A Web 2.0 website has the feature to allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a virtual community, also called social media.
Social media platforms
Social media have many different platforms that people can access at any time. Social media have been gradually established over time, resulting in the core ‘top 5’ social networks which don’t change much from year-to-year. The usage of networking sites varies a lot depending on the level of usage in different countries and demographics.
Looking at social media networks worldwide, the ‘top 5’ dominating ones are Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, QQ and WeChat, as of April 2016. Other common networks include Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Skype and Snapchat, to name a few.
Social media platforms such as Facebook dominate the market because of their varied content. The platform has responded to the media platform YouTube by integrating more media such as photo filters, native videos and live streaming. (Mintel, 2016)
This procedure has blurred the boundaries between social and media networks and as a result, Facebook has seen a growth in penetration in 2016 compared to a decline in users visiting YouTube. (Mintel, 2016)
Social media marketing - A new trend in management?
Social networking sites have arrived in today’s world and are being used by retailers to extend their marketing campaigns to a wider range of consumers. Chi (2011, 46) defines social media marketing as a “connection between brands and consumers, while offering a personal channel and currency for user-centred networking and social interaction”. On the other hand, (Felix et al., 2016) generally states that it is the use of social media platforms to promote a product or service.
As of January 2016, the total population was 7,395 billion.
A third (31%) of the overall population are active users on social media, 2,307
billion people. (Smart Insights, 2016)
The effective use of social media marketing can have many important effects for businesses.
Back in 2014, Forbes (2014) listed benefits for businesses that use social media for marketing purposes: Increased brand recognition, improved brand loyalty, better search engine rankings
and richer customer experiences, to name a few.
In conclusion, Forbes magazine (2014) stated that “social media marketing, when done right, can lead to more customers, more traffic, and more conversations.”
Those statistics come from 2014 and back then, social media marketing was already an emerging new trend for businesses. Trends in management can be described as a large, measurable shift that influences values and behaviours. A trend is normally triggered when a larger force asserts itself on a culture, forcing that culture to respond and change. (Hawkpartners, 2017)
Back in 2014, social media was slowly emerging but was also considered by some people as a passing fad, something that is only temporary. (Hootsuit, 2016)
In 2014, statistics from the MarchTech (2014) showed that 8 of out 10 SMBs use social media for the business to drive growth. 3 in 5 SMBs mentioned they had gained new customers by using social media.
Nowadays, popular social media platforms have become very important for businesses as they offer valuable data about their customers and it is mostly free to reach out to them. As of 2016, social media integration for businesses is no longer optional. (Hootsuit, 2016)
A recent report from Mintel (2016) states that in the United Kingdom, as of July 2016, 81% of consumers have visited a social media network, with 75% having visited Facebook.
The social media platform remains the number one network in the world, with over 1.59 billion users on Facebook each month.
However, the report also mentions that brand interactions on social media remain limited. Despite the popularity of social media, “more than half of all social media users in the UK say that they would never buy a product using a ‘Buy’ button”, (Mintel, 2016)
Although this is the case, social media marketing remains a management practise.
IGI Global (2013) indicates that management practises usually refer to working methods and innovations that are approved by managers and are used to improve effectiveness of work systems.
Social media are mostly used as a marketing and customer service tool that aims to direct customers towards the websites or the stores. (Mintel, 2016)
It has become a trend in management over recent years and has shown that it is important for businesses to invest into the use of social media.
At the beginning of 2017, new social media marketing trends are expected to take over soon.
Sprout Social (2017) have come up with new trends that will be emerging in 2017.
New trends include more customer service (Chat-bots) that improve customer care, priority on business features and analytics, social shopping, instant purchases and many more.
Social media will always grow and new technologies will improve the online environment. Therefore, new methods and procedures of social media marketing will emerge that will develop the use of social media marketing and its effectiveness over the next years.
All in all, social media marketing has become an important management practise that started trending a few years ago. It will keep its status of being a new trend for management as new possibilities to make social media marketing even more profitable will arise.
Is Social media marketing relevant to society?
Another relevant question for businesses aiming to implement social media strategies in their marketing portfolio is to find out how social media marketing is relevant to today’s society. Statistics from Statista (2016) show the daily time spent on social networking platforms by Internet users worldwide from 2012 to 2016 in minutes.
These statistics show that in 2012 the daily time spent on social media worldwide was 96 minutes whereas nowadays in 2016 it is 118 minutes daily. This is an increase of 19% between the years 2012 and 2016.
Given that information and the statistics by Smart Insights (2016) stating that 31% of the overall population are actively using social media, it is an indication that social media is relevant to today’s society. Businesses need to react towards this trend and invest heavily into their social media marketing portfolio in order to reach out to the 2.307 billion people that are actively using social media on a daily basis. (Smart Insights, 2016)
Implementation of a social media marketing strategy
The process of all businesses that aim to use social media for marketing purposes is to carefully consider the implementation process of doing so. It is important to consider a relationship between a social media marketing strategy and the desired outcomes.
With the help of social media, businesses are able to communicate not only with existing customers but also to acquire new customers. (Chanthinok et al., 2015,39)
Chanthinok et al. (2015,40) suggest that in order to successfully implement a social media marketing strategy, a key conceptual framework, involving customers, products, and competitor response aspects, needs to be taken into consideration.
Customer communication channel focus
One of the components of a social media marketing strategy is the focus on the customer communication channels. It refers to the “ability of a firm to employ social media tools to announce, contact educate, and connect with its customers and prospects, giving them a voice and discussion on shared interest in order to enhance the relationship with consumers.” (Chanthinok et al., 2015,40)
In other words, businesses are only successfully implementing a social media marketing campaign if they carefully consider which social media channel they use. The key is to reach out to customers on platforms that are very popular and used by all possible customers.
As already mentioned above, Mintel’s (2016) report states that 75% of those 81% of the population who visit a social media platform use Facebook as their main communication/social media channel. Therefore, it can be said that Facebook as the most popular platform has the largest audience and is therefore the ideal choice for a marketing campaign.
However, each individual platform has different capabilities.
Where YouTube mainly focuses on media, Twitter on short messages, so-called ‘Tweets’ and Instagram on the sharing of photos, Facebook combines all of the above and therefore makes it the most usable social media platform.
Product Diversity Presentation Awareness
The term product diversity presentation awareness indicates the ability of a firm to match the expectations that customers have. This can be based on features of the products, packaging, design and brand image. (Frambach et al., 2003)
In order for businesses to be successful in delivering a social media marketing campaign, all the above perceived values that consumers desire must be met. On the other hand, this promotes the positive brand values that consumers will identify with a brand.
Overall, the product presentation online and therefore the perceived perception of the product plays an important role in the decision whether or not consumers buy the product/ service or not.
Proactive competitor learning capability
This important concept refers to the ability of a firm to ‘scan’ and monitor its competitive environment. According to Ma et al. (2011), this is done in order to forecast and evaluate competitive situations and to access their marketing activity and strategies relating to the social media implementation. Proactive learning can be divided into two categories, external and internal learning. The external part takes place when analysing competitor’s behaviour. It is one way to achieve competitive advantage.
The proactive competitor learning capability is very important for businesses to implement social media marketing strategies. Making use of available information from competitors can increase the effectiveness of the proposed social media marketing campaign.
Traditional Media vs. Social Media Advertising
The difference between traditional marketing strategies and social media marketing is important for businesses aiming to implement social media marketing campaigns.
First and foremost, statistics by Lyfe Marketing (2016) show that, if the company uses social media marketing, it costs less than $3 ($2.50) to reach out to over 100 people. As opposed to newspaper with $16, broadcast TV with $28 and direct mail adding up to $57. This shows how comparatively inexpensive social media marketing can be.
Additionally, social media offers to incorporate traditional elements into the campaign. Businesses can advertise video commercials, publish articles, host live streams and webinars and many more. Lyfe Marketing (2016) indicates that “Social media is the only ‘billboard’ that can communicate to your customers, answer their questions, and provide them with feedback.”
All in all, social media marketing is the cheapest way for businesses to implement marketing campaigns and it’s the only way that can combine both traditional marketing aspects and social media.
Case Study Mercedes Benz
The following example of a case study represents a very good use of social media to attract customers and to raise awareness. Back in 2013, Mercedes Benz launched a social media marketing campaign.
The social media campaign had the title ‘Take the Wheel: a photography competition on the road’ (Mercedes-Benz, 2013) Five of Instagram’s top photographers each had the challenge to drive the CLA for 5 days around a certain route in America. The route was different for all participants.
It was the overall task for each individual candidate to upload as many interesting, breath-taking and fascinating photographs on their journey with the CLA.
Whoever, reached the goal of having the most likes on all pictures combined, was able to keep the Mercedes CLA. Mercedes called the 5-day competition the ‘Battle of likes’ and inspired the participants with the opportunity for limitless creativity. (Mercedes-Benz, 2013)
Mercedes wanted to reach out to the younger audience of social media. By the end of the campaign, Mercedes received 87,000,000 Instagram impressions, 2,000,000 Instagram likes and 150 marketing assets in form of fascinating photos. (Mercedes-Benz, 2013)
Nowadays, this form of marketing is very popular among businesses of all sorts. Companies that thrive to motivate customers into buying products or services need a good marketing team to convince and sell their products to the audience.
Case Study Emirates
The foreign airline company Emirates has had a few very successful social media campaigns in 2016. The overall challenge was to convince people to fly with Emirates as opposed to their competitors. It was not enough to just offer the best plane and great service.
Emirates marketing team understood that and used the actress Jennifer Aniston to represent their brand as a brand influencer. (David, 2016)
Emirates combined their classic tours through the cabins and the experience inside an Emirates plane with the charming attendance of Jennifer, using her as a tour guide through the plane. This method has brought Emirates over 5.2 million views on their video. (Emirates, 2016)
It was Emirate’s overall aim to attract more customers into flying with Emirates by using Jennifer Aniston representing the company.
Social Cognitive Theory
In the 1960s, Albert Bandura developed the Social Cognitive Theory that has its roots in psychology. His theory was that humans learn behaviours by others performing those behaviours and imitating them. (Bandura, 1989)
In today’s society, social media platforms become the source of observational learning. (Bandura, 1989)
This model can be applied to many different variables like the attitude towards the environment or purchasing behaviour.
For instance, Emirates uses a famous actress to advertise their planes, in order to attract more customers and therefore use a cognitive behavioural approach to try to persuade people to use Emirates for their next journey.
Many companies use and pay famous or influential people on social media to advertise their products. Using famous people that have reached a certain amount of “followers” are the ideal match for marketing campaigns on social media. Those celebrities are followed by the vast majority of users on social media and are therefore very helpful when companies are trying to reach out to people or to persuade people to purchase products.
The social cognitive theory can also be applied when campaigns appear that promote awareness of the environment. Many famous individuals like Leonardo DiCaprio are trying to spread awareness for climate change. They achieve this by using social media marketing to reach out to as many people as possible, knowing that people will listen and even implement the same environmental safety steps to follow their idols. With the help of his 14 million followers on Instagram, Caprio can easily reach many people at the same time. The Guardian (2016) represents him as one of the world’s top climate change champions, having his own foundation with funding of at least $30 million dollars.
Reaching out to people in order to gain more customers from the company’s perspective or to raise awareness for global problems are two ways of using social media marketing, reaching out to over 2.3 billion active users. (Smart Insights, 2016)
Conclusion
In conclusion, social media marketing is relatively new to our society. Social media had its origins in 2002 with the establishment of Friendster, which was one of the first social media platforms in the 21st century, Facebook appearing in 2004, as a social media platform only open to Harvard students and shortly after that in 2006 the text-based social media service Twitter was introduced. (Social Times, 2011)
In 2007, Facebook introduced ‘Pages’, allowing businesses to create their own pages to advertise their products and services. This example of Facebook introducing their own way for people to use Facebook as their social media marketing platform was clever. As of January 2016, Facebook alone runs 50 million small business pages. (Facebook, 2016)
Overall, it is a trending and growing marketing strategy with more and more companies adopting towards it.
Even though social media platforms have been around for almost two decades and social media marketing is common to our society, businesses still keep adapting towards the possibilities to implement social media into their marketing strategies. Therefore, it indicates that the process of implementing social media marketing campaigns is a relatively new concept.
Additionally, based on the statistics showing an increase in the usage of social media, social media marketing will keep its status of being a new trend in management.
As Hawkpartners (2017) mentioned, trends are shaped by large forces and evolve over time.
Since social media were first established in the early years of the 21st century until now, social media marketing has been discussed and implemented by many businesses. It has evolved over time and many possibilities to use social media as a marketing tool have occurred. However, new technologies and concepts to use social media even more effectively will arrive in the future. Therefore, social media marketing won’t lose its status of being a new trend in management.
Furthermore, social media marketing is also a very important management practise as social media are widely accepted by many businesses and their management.
It is a common tool amongst businesses nowadays and even one of the cheapest ways to communicate with customers and to raise brand awareness.
With the increasing number of businesses and management adapting social media marketing and the ever-growing number of people using social media on a daily basis, social media will play a very big role in our society over the coming years, both for individuals and for businesses.
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